A hand held cutting tool for cutting thin strips of mat board is disclosed in U.S. Pat. No. 4,438,563 to Turner. This hand held tool has a housing within which a plurality of blades are mounted to swing about an axis between exposed or cutting positions and retracted or storage positions. By selectively placing respective blades in retracted or exposed positions, the width and number of the strips being cut can be varied.
Other hand held cutters for cutting sheet material, particularly mat material, are disclosed in U.S. Pat. No. 4,064,626 to Meshulam et al. and U.S. Pat. No. 4,096,631 to Ward. However, the cutters disclosed in these two patents do not have a plurality of parallel blades for cutting a plurality of strips simultaneously.
Such conventional devices are disadvantageous in that they are complicated and expensive to manufacture and operate. Specifically, they involve a number of relatively intricate parts which are expensive and difficult to manufacture and assemble.